The Prison History Project at the Indiana Women's Prison and Its Implications for Optimizing the Delivery of STEM Programming in Carceral Settings

Abstract

Just as urban education scholars are beginning to challenge deficit-based with asset-based perspectives, historians in the Indiana Women's Prison History Project seek to overcome epistemic injustice by epistemically privileging the perspective of incarcerated women as we approach archives and prevailing historical narratives. This article constitutes an initial exploration of how a unique methodology, the embodied observer, can apply to STEM fields—which have a legacy of excluding, exploiting, and abusing marginalized populations—and humanities disciplines like history. The embodied observer is physically located in a captive setting and utilizes that purview of captivity as one lens to engage in archival research.

Keywords

women and girls < identity incarceration < social qualitative < scale construction

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